Jewish Mothers Never Die

by Natalie David-Weill

  Unconvinced, Louise continued to provide her version of events:

  “I think that the only thing that interested Albert was his writing. I was just material for his character, and a pathetic character at that: he describes me as having ‘a rather large nose’ and ‘slightly swollen ankles’ and he wrote that I was ‘a bit ridiculous’ as I ‘lumbered along with one arm outstretched to steady my walk.’ I can recite for you some other things he called me: ‘a wicked fairy,’ ‘not very clever,’ ‘carefree,’ ‘awkward,’ ‘clumsy,’ ‘simple.’ He even goes so far as to say I was a ‘a poor, put-upon saint’ who was ‘born to be swindled’ and ‘a little unhinged by . . . distress.’ But no matter how much I studied my reflection in the mirror to try to find that person he describes, I didn’t see the least resemblance.”

  Jeanne couldn’t resist bringing her own son into the conversation.

  “Marcel thought that only people with a strong imagination were interesting; everybody else was mere material for his books. He also thought that the artist who interrupts his work to chat with a friend ‘knows that he is sacrificing something that is real for something else which is not.’ He couldn’t have been more blunt. He didn’t even spare me—his own mother! But I think I’m not the only one here to deserve such a treatment.”

  “You decry the fact that your sons altered you for the purposes of their stories, but that’s the point: they weren’t you. They’re only characters!” Rebecca reminded them.”

  “You can’t be serious! Even in their books, they wanted to kills us,” Louise Cohen retorted. “In Albert’s, he orphans Adrien Deume, and Solal refuses to see his parents because he’s ashamed of them.”

  Louise had found more food for thought in Portnoy’s Complaint:

  “Do any of you remember how Alex Portnoy explains his friend Ronald Nimkin’s suicide? I’ll quote him: ‘Because we can’t take it anymore! Because you fucking Jewish mothers are just too fucking much to bear!’”

  Jeanne was pounding noisily at the piano in a vain attempt to quiet her distress. The cacophony was intolerable. Mina came in looking for her and led her to a seat in front of the movie screen.

  “Why don’t we watch that Woody Allen movie?” Jeanne began before veering immediately back to the subject of her personal suffering. “We have every reason in the world to be devastated. Take me, for example: it pains me deeply that Marcel remains anonymous in Remembrance of Things Past. He’s just ‘The Narrator,’ a character so formless that he doesn’t even merit a description. It’s obvious Marcel wanted nothing to do with me. That turns out to be complicated though: my little wolf has to twist his syntax to avoid naming him. Here’s one example: ‘He did not yet know me but having heard his comrades of longer standing supplement the word “Monsieur” when they addressed me, with my surname, he copied them.’”

  “Albertine calls him Marcel,” Rebecca reminded her.

  “He also calls himself Marcel one time, but once in over three thousand pages doesn’t prove anything.”

  Rebecca remembered how important names were to Proust. His infatuation with Albert Agostinelli, for example, led to his naming the Narrator’s love, Albertine.

  “Unfortunately, Marcel used his fiction to cover up what he didn’t want anyone to know: that he was a Jew and homosexual. I never could bear that.”

  “You’re not the only one who was hurt by the names our sons chose,” Mina piped up. “Romain loved to use different ones.”

  “I thought that was your idea!” Rebecca exclaimed. “It’s not true what he writes, in Promise at Dawn, that you told him he’d never become a French novelist with his Russian name? He says you even came up with some possible solutions: Alexandre Natal, Armand de la Torre, Terral, Vasco de la Fernaye . . . Pages and pages of names in fact. ‘After each glittering parade of conquering names, we looked at each other, and shook our heads. No it won’t do—it won’t do at all.’”

  “Maybe, but Roman Kacew was the one who came up with Romain Gary when he was completing his military service, without ever consulting me; I might have showed him how to go about it. He was also the one who decided to change his identity. It wasn’t enough for him to be a pilot, a diplomat and a writer; he had to lead two or three different lives, and still he was never satisfied: ‘The truth is that I was profoundly affected by the oldest protean temptation of man: that of multiplicity. . . . I have always been someone else.’”

  “Isn’t that true for all writers, the desire to reinvent themselves and explore different lives?” Rebecca wondered. “You shouldn’t take it personally. I’m sure they didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “There are only two kinds of writers,” Jeanne declared categorically. “The ones like Romain who believe in the myth of Proteus, and the ones who are much more like Narcissus, which was Marcel’s case.”

  Rebecca wanted Jeanne to explain. She knew that Narcissus fell in love with his reflection and died of frustrated desire, but she couldn’t remember who Proteus was. Jeanne scolded her as if she were a child who hadn’t learned her lessons:

  “Of course you do! Because Proteus could predict the future, Menelaus wanted to hang on to him but he changed into different shapes to escape: a lion, a snake, a panther, a boar, water, a tree . . .”

  “Woody Allen made a film on the same subject. It’s called Zelig.”

  “Zelig? What a ridiculous name.”

  “Well, it’s a good movie. Why don’t we watch it? You’ll see!”

  “What about Oedipus Wrecks?” Minnie demanded.

  “We’ll watch it after,” Jeanne decided.

  The movie began but no one could keep quiet. Jeanne kept up a stream of comments.

  “To look at him, there’s nothing unusual about Leonard Zelig, but he’s a regular Proteus: his skin turns dark when he’s with people of color, his eyes turn up at the edges when he’s with Asians, he claims he has a degree in psychology when he’s with a psychologist . . . Such a chameleon, but no personality.”

  “Shh! Be quiet!” Minnie scolded her. “We can’t hear anything!”

  “This Mr. Zelig is the exact opposite of Marcel, who is the center of his own fictional world of Parisian high society,” Jeanne continued.

  “Like Albert, in his mythical Cephalonia,” Louise agreed.

  “Or Isaac Bashevis Singer in Krochmalna Street,” Rebecca chimed in.

  “Enough!” cried Minnie.

  The lights came back on. Rebecca wanted to question Jeanne some more, but Minnie was ready to talk; she found her sons infinitely more interesting.

  “The Marx Brothers were nothing like Proteus or Narcissus, although they did use nicknames. They only wanted to protect their privacy, not change their personalities or hide their real identities. All artists have stage names.”

  “Where did they get their nicknames?” Rebecca asked.

  “Harpo took his name from his harp, Chico from his reputation with the ‘chicks,’ Gummo from his rubber orthopedic insoles, and Zeppo was invented by Chico randomly. Groucho is named after the ‘grouch bag’ he wore around his neck to keep whatever little money he earned safe. . . from Chico.”

  “That’s how he got his name? I thought it came from his grouchy personality.”

  “That’s true also, but not as flattering for him, especially after their given names were forgotten so completely. My sons became their personas, pure and simple. Harpo could never find a harp teacher who would teach him the correct way to play. They all said it was a waste of time with an autodidact like him. In reality, none of them wanted Harpo to play well; they liked him just as he was in the movies.”

  “And Groucho?”

  “After inventing jokes for so long, he became the least funny of my sons: an uptight, moody intellectual.”

  “Just like Woody Allen,” Rebecca remarked.

  “You’re not going to start begging us to find his mother again!” Jeanne exclaimed. “It’s time for bed. We can continue this discussion first thing tomorrow.”

 
Rebecca was amazed! Although time had no meaning for them anymore, they followed a schedule so strict it would have made a mother superior proud.

  “Why do you want to sleep? Even when I was alive, I considered it a waste of time.”

  “Have more than enough time for anything now,” Jeanne retorted.

  “Rules were made to be broken,” Mina chimed in. “Go to bed if you want, Jeanne. I’m staying up with Rebecca.”

  Louise Cohen got to her feet.

  “As for me, I’m done talking for today.”

  “And I miss my pillow,” Minnie said, stretching herself. “I always loved to sleep late and I never did it enough when I was alive.”

  Rebecca and Mina settled themselves on opposite ends of a couch with a warm plaid blanket between them. They were like girls at a sleepover, thrilled by the prospect of a whole night of talk.

  “Romain led many lives, and not just the ones in his novels. First Kacew, then Gary, then Emile Ajar. ‘I was tired of being nothing but myself,’ he said. But he had multiple identities already: Jewish, Catholic, French, Russian, Tartar.”

  “Didn’t he publish The Faces of Stephanie under the pen name Shatan Bogat, pretending he was an unknown author and even inventing a biography for him? ‘The son of a Turkish immigrant, Shatan Bogat is thirty-nine years old and a native of Oregon. He was formerly the director of a maritime transport and fishing company with operations in the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf. Arms trafficking was the inspiration for this novel. Bogat was awarded the Dakkan Prize in 1970 for his reporting on the international trade in gold and arms.’ For good measure, he even wrote a different English-language version of the same book and said it was translated by one Françoise Lovat, whom he also invented.”

  “He finally did admit that he was Shatan Bogat, saying he had needed ‘to take a break from himself for one book.’”

  “Do you mind, Mina, if I read from Treasures from the Dead Sea, where Romain writes: ‘Never before had I felt so intensely that I was no one, that is to say that I was someone.’ He incarnated the characters that he created. He liked to confuse his readers, the better to stay in control of his identity.”

  “Yes, but it amused him as well. His system worked fine until he wrote Gros-Câlin, using the pen name Emile Ajar for the first time.”

  “I never understood why he hired his grand-nephew, Paul Pavlowitch, to pretend he was Ajar.”

  “That was madness,” Mina said. “At first, he found it very amusing. He carefully instructed Paul on what to say in ‘Shatan’s’ first interview with the press: that his real name was Hamil Raja, that he had gotten into some legal trouble in Brazil but was able to enter Switzerland thanks to a diplomat’s daughter whom he knew, before writing Gros-Câlin under the pen name Emile Ajar. Paul finally let the cat out of the bag, and it went badly for them.”

  Rebecca was wondering why Romain Gary had committed suicide. Had he become trapped in his own lies, or lost his grip on his characters, or did he feel cheated of some glory that he deserved? Not long after the critics had destroyed Gary’s book, Your Ticket Is No Longer Valid, which was the story of an aging, impotent writer, they acclaimed Ajar as a brilliant, modern new voice. Romain had never received that kind of praise when he published under his real name.

  Mina was looking straight ahead, her gaze distant. After a moment, she shook herself and declared with conviction:

  “Romain chose to die. It was his right. It wasn’t like everyone says, that he was depressed or felt incapable of going on. He wanted to choose the moment when his life would end, not leave it to chance. He also couldn’t bear the idea of getting old.”

  She smoothed her hair, slipped her shoes back on and stood up.

  “In any case, he wasn’t himself anymore towards the end.”

  Mina looked so sad that Rebecca had the impression that she could see right through her. Was she dreaming or was Mina becoming a ghost of herself, the kind of half-invisible phantom that people imagine? Were all these women going to gradually fade away right before her eyes?

  To shake off this terrifying idea, and to bring Mina back to herself, she proposed with fake enjoyment that they go into the kitchen; they were sure to find whatever they would need to bake a cake.

  Rebecca was picking at a plate of almonds, dates and an assortment of dried fruit while Mina, rolling pin in hand, formed a circle of dough, looking for a recipe for honey cake. Rebecca was trying to understand the reasons for Romain’s suicide, and talking out loud was helping her.

  “Romain’s idea that ‘loving is inventing,’ that we are the creations of the people who love us, is an interesting one. Wasn’t it you who said that what’s missing in life is talent?”

  “That’s right. I must have taught him that, but, as usual, he put theory into practice and went too far,” Mina replied softly. “That’s how he created a legend of himself, inventing stories from nothing, even when they contradicted each other. For example, whenever anyone asked him where he had gone to school in Warsaw, he asserted he went to the French lycée, although he never was a student there because I couldn’t afford the tuition. He would justify this piece of disinformation, saying, ‘My mother did her best, why should I deprive her of the fruit of her labors?’ He learned the art of fabrication from me. I loved the idea of my letters in Promise At Dawn; it touched so many readers.”

  “What? That’s not true either?” Rebecca asked, shocked by this new falsehood.

  “What of it? He makes me a heroine: the person I always dreamed I could be. He lies, but it’s only to make me happy.”

  For Rebecca, however, this revelation changed everything; she had believed in the magnificent story of how Mina had taken the trouble to write two hundred and fifty letters to Romain, then asked a friend to send them to him one by one to make him believe she was still alive so he could continue to fight to liberate France from the Germans. But there was something else in this new deception that troubled Rebecca: if Romain imagined the letters, then he must have created them as symbols of his mother’s oppressive, suffocating love, a love that was capable of following him from beyond the grave.

  “How did he learn of your death, in that case?” Rebecca asked to hide her consternation from Mina.

  “He received a telegram.”

  This time it was Rebecca who needed fresh air. Their long, uninterrupted conversation had exhausted her.

  She returned to the multimedia room to watch Woody Allen’s Deconstructing Harry. She laughed at the protagonist, an egotistical author who draws the material for his successful novels from his relationships, but who finds himself struggling to write. Hounded by his characters who show up one after the other to lecture him, he is forced to concede that his own life is a disaster.

  “Romain could have written that one,” declared Mina, who had been looking for Rebecca. “Can we watch another one? I’m getting to like Woody Allen.”

  “How about The Purple Rose of Cairo?”

  “Tell me the story first, Rebecca. I hate surprises. I always read the end of a book first: that way I’m never frightened, whatever happens.”

  “It takes place in New Jersey in the 1930s. Mia Farrow plays the heroine, who tries to forget the monotony of her married life and the troubles of the Great Depression by going to the movies. The dashing leading man in one of them jumps from the screen and appears before her, declaring his love. The other characters run off in fright while the producers, more annoyed than surprised, pursue their run-away star. The leading man discovers the world as it is, where cars don’t await their drivers with the motors running and the lights on, where a fade-out doesn’t prudishly hide what lovers do and where pregnant women have actual babies in their swollen stomachs, not pillows.

  “I don’t want to brag, but Woody wasn’t the first person to think of that story. Romain wrote: ‘Attacked by reality on every front, forced back on every side and constantly coming up against my own limitations, I developed the habit of seeking refuge in an imaginary world wh
ere, by proxy, through the medium of invented characters, I could find a life in which there were meaning, justice and compassion.’”

  The film credits ran as the lights came back on, revealing Amalia Freud and Louise Cohen sitting in the back row. They burst into applause.

  “That reminded me of Sigi’s concept of the ‘family romance,’” Amalia said.

  “I can’t say I see what you mean.” Mina said.

  “I mean that artists aren’t the only ones with imaginations: perfectly ordinary people have some too. Sigmund exposed the fact that most children invent they have been adopted and suppose that their real parents are much younger, richer, more successful . . . In short, they believe that their ‘real’ parents make them more special than the people who actually raised them.”

  “Writers have more imagination than anyone. Not only did Romain eliminate his father from his ‘family romance’ when Arieh left me for a younger woman, but he created multiple fathers for himself, like Ivan Mosjoukine, whom I had told him so much about. But why don’t we see him in person? He’s the actor in the Russian film The Queen of Spades.”

  Mina jumped up to find the movie. It was filmed in 1916 and the reels looked every bit their age, but Mina saw none of the imperfections, only Ivan’s beautiful eyes.

  “He’s certainly handsome, but what a boring film!” Rebecca said.

  “Quiet, please!” Mina begged. “I can’t hear anything.”

  “You’re thinking he looks like Romain, I bet,” Louise said.

  “Obviously,” Mina replied.

  The lights came back up. Blinking, Louise Cohen had something to say.

  “Albert invented an imaginary father, too. He liked to think that he was ‘born by magic’ and that his real father was a prince. He could never accept that a man as common as Marco could possibly be his father. He thought he belonged to a higher species entirely.”

  “Romain was just the same: he refused to believe his own genes. Do you know he once said that he had dermatological problems because of having ‘inherited’ someone else’s skin?”